ALICE JAMES
11 HAMILTON TERRACE, LEAMINGTON
JUNE 10, 1889
TO WILLIAM JAMES
A life-interest in a shawl, with reversion to the male heir, is so extraordinary & ludicrous a bequest that I can hardly think it could have been very seriously meant. My desire would, naturally, be to renounce my passing claim to that also, as I can hardly conceive of myself, under any conditions, as so abject as to grasp at a life-interest in a shawl!
P.S. If the shawl were left to me outright, I should leave it to you, William, on condition that you wrap it about you while you perform that unaeasthetic duty, which will one day fall to you, of passing my skin and bones through the Custom House.
HENRY JAMES
11 HAMILTON TERRACE, LEAMINGTON
MAY 24, 1889
TO WILLIAM JAMES
Alice told me she didn’t remember definitely how she had written to you, but that her letter proceeded really from a sense that she had been snubbed in her innermost, and later, on receipt of your letter, that she had been still more snubbed. Your mistake was, I take it, that you wrote to her too much as a well woman.
She cried to me about the cruelty or at least infelicity of AK’s taking from her, in her miserably limited little helpless life, the luxury of devising for herself the disposal of the objects in question. She has had a bad time of it ever since Aunt Kate began seriously to fail. She only gets on so long as nothing happens.
NINE
I AM SORRY TO SAY THAT AUNT KATE DID NOT PASS LIGHTLY through the mists and veils of eternity. This is what happens when your kin are in thrall to soothsayers. My brother Bob (now residing in Concord) and William’s Alice were having one of their frequent “sittings” with Mrs. Piper, in Boston. (I have never wavered in my opinion of Mrs. P. I’d sooner walk naked in Piccadilly than allow that seeress to gaze upon the mysteries of my soul!) Aunt Kate was known to be gravely ill, and Alice asked after her health. “She is poorly,” Mrs. P. replied and went on to blurt, a few minutes later, “Why, Aunt Kate’s here! All around me I hear voices saying, ‘Aunt Kate’s come!’” (All this is recounted in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, if you care to look it up.) When Alice and Bob pressed her for details, they were informed that Aunt Kate had died early that morning.
Galvanized by this message, Bob bolted from the room and flew to the office of the American Society for Psychical Research, where William happened to be. An official statement was extracted from Bob, noting the date and time. A few hours later, William, at home, received a telegram from Cousin Lilla Walsh, notifying him that Aunt Kate had died that very morning. But since Aunt Kate’s illness was known to all parties, how difficult would it have been for the pythoness to guess that she’d “passed over”?
I don’t think Aunt Kate can be blamed for this sorry manifestation.
For the past few weeks I’ve been contemplating her life, and it occurs to me that she never sensed how much we resisted her. My failing her, after Father’s death, must have seemed a great and ungrateful betrayal; my inability to explain myself, and hers to understand the situation, made it all the sadder and more ugly.
A week later, Henry is back with me again, bon comme le pain. I ask him if he knows what the Captain did to Aunt Kate exactly. He doesn’t, but recalls Father saying that the Captain “banished smiles and tears, laughter and all human sympathies to the opposite hemisphere.” Poor Aunt Kate: her one romance ending so disastrously, her only souvenir the “Mrs.” that afterward was appended to her maiden name. Mrs. Walsh.
“It is rather a mystery, Henry. Don’t you wish you could travel back in time?”
“Maybe some of it is in a letter somewhere. Though probably not.”
“Oh, Henry, didn’t I tell you? Right after Father died, when I was so ill, Aunt Kate took the family letters from Father’s chest of drawers and began tossing them into the fire. Katherine caught her red-handed and protested, ‘But those are James family papers!’ Aunt Kate said it was better that ‘the children’ not read them. Doesn’t it grieve you that our past is gone, wiped clean? Surely it was not Aunt Kate’s place to censor our family letters! What do you think she was trying to prevent our knowing? Maybe she was trying to eliminate every unflattering glimpse of herself.”
After a long, uncomfortable pause, Henry says, “Aunt Kate did the proper thing.”
Oh! Why didn’t I see it before? Henry burns many of the letters he receives. I’ve seen him at work by the fireplace, pruning his legacy. After an awkward silence, he adds, “It was not Katherine’s place—well, never mind.” With an uneasy glance at me, he falls silent.
“How can you say that, Henry?”
“You know what vultures the press and the public can be, Alice.”
“But Aunt Kate is of no possible interest to either.”
Clearing his throat, my brother shifts uneasily in his chair, and then the scales fall from my eyes. He is nervous about his public and his reputation and his posthumous life. And evidently agrees with Aunt Kate that Katherine is an interloper in our family, despite having kept me alive by sheer willpower for months at a time. But some things cannot be spoken. Being so much at odds with William, I can hardly afford to quarrel with Henry, too; a person has only so much spleen at hand at any given time. I am glad at any rate that I have not told him of my diary. He would view it as part of his “remains,” not as mes beaux restes. Perhaps I shall leave instructions to have it published.
A heavy silence weighs upon us.
Over the next weeks, further postmortem effects transpire through Aunt Kate’s last will and testament. To start with, she had a much larger estate than any of us suspected. After leaving $10,000 each to William and to Wilky’s widow, she left the bulk of her estate to some obscure Walsh cousins in Connecticut and some Cochrane relatives in Minnesota of whom we’d scarcely heard before. She left nothing to Bob. Henry was given a choice of some heirlooms. I received a bit of family silver and a “life-interest” in a valuable shawl, which, according to the will, must revert to a male heir upon my demise.
“Why has my aunt, who was a second mother to me, treated me like a distant relation of no account?” I sob to Nurse. “I don’t mind her leaving her money to those who need it more, but this shawl business is a slap in the face.” (I am pleased to say that Nurse feels very injured on my account.) A day or two later, enlightenment dawns. Aunt Kate was determined to keep the shawl from passing on to Katherine’s evil shoulders after my demise. How unspeakably it pains me to think of this.
When I try to communicate my feelings to William (by letter, of course) he regards me as a mad Fury, or so I discover later. Aunt Kate’s gift of the bulk of her fortune to the mysterious far-flung Cochranes instead of to our family, with whom she lived for years at a time, is a great enigma, the other being that William is the only member of our family to receive a sizable sum. With his large brood, he needs money more than I do, but poor Henry is feeling the pinch these days and I’d always thought he was our aunt’s favorite. Maybe, at the end, her affections flowed to the fertile branches of the family tree instead of the fallow ones; perhaps she yearned to perpetuate herself through the generations.
Anyway, I make the mistake of writing William a long epistle in which the following passage appears: Your ease in your position as exceptional nephew, etc. showed an artless healthy-mindedness suggestive of primitive man. Perhaps I did go a bit far, but I was provoked. Anyhow, it was a joke!
William’s next letter blasts me to kingdom come, taking me to task for taking Aunt Kate’s bequest “so hard” and pointing out, as if I were simple-minded, that other relatives are more in need of cash than I. As is William himself, evidently. His letter runs on for pages about the expense of the maintenance of two houses, property taxes, servants’ salaries, Harry’s school tuition, the expense of traveling abroad to replenish himself every time he breaks down. As if I were trying to steal the bread out of his children’s mouths!
As I read the le
tter, the teacup shakes in my hand and slops tea into the saucer. I consider breaking off relations with William. When I mention this to Henry the next time he visits, he says, “I understand how you feel, Alice, but you must know our bonds can never, ever be severed.” But I wonder how William and I will manage to go on from here, and this thought pains me more than I can say. It has not escaped Nurse’s notice that I fell ill shortly after William’s letters darkened our threshold, and she took the unprecedented step of writing William to inform him that his letters were making me ill. Henry also wrote to him explaining that there was nothing materialistic in my feelings about the will. William eventually apologized, after a fashion, probably mostly to placate Harry.
TEN
FROM MY INVALID-COUCH I WATCH A BOWLEGGED OLD WOMAN in a shabby grey dress lumber along Hamilton Terrace, rocking from hip to hip, every gust inflating her skirts like a sail. I feel the rocking gait, the heaviness of limbs, the cold fingers of the wind up my skirt. I feel the hunger gnawing at the ragged children’s bellies and the sharp flesh-craving of the crows that dive repeatedly into the road. I don’t know why this has started happening, this wandering out of my skin; I certainly don’t intend to mention it to Nurse or Henry. Still, it’s oddly enjoyable.
The honeymooning couple who were always misplacing their key are dead, of scarlet fever. Poor young things, married for less than forty days. At least they went to eternity madly in love and didn’t have to witness the toll time would have exacted. The Bachellers, Brookses, and Edwardses have added a total of five unfortunate infants to their broods in the past two years, burdening the older children with more small siblings to tote around. Since his nocturnal invasion of my rooms, the parson has vanished from sight.
I’ve begun to wonder lately if life is a sort of dream. It is true that the physical world seems real and solid enough: fire burns, water reliably boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, if you fall from a great height you break your bones. It appears that you and I inhabit the same world, with the same planets and constellations and laws of momentum, gravity, and whatnot, but I have thought long and hard, and however I try to think my way around it, it seems inescapable that the world I know comes to me through my senses. Without the senses there would be no world at all. All of it might be the dream of a solitary dreamer dreaming a world into existence, including millions of other people who appear to live alongside one. Can we ever know there is anything out there?
This is what I am meditating on when my bell rings, announcing a visit from Mrs. Arnold. I am overjoyed to see her again, especially without Miss Percy attached. She reports that she is much improved after taking a course of the waters at the Royal Leamington Spa, attributing her revival particularly to “Swiss showers” and certain mineral waters. She does look less weary and definitely less sallow than before.
I tell her that I have been told in the strictest terms by doctors that I must await some miracle of nature that will render me capable of taking the waters and so far this has failed to transpire. “And,” I add, “these doctors tell you that you will either die or recover. But you don’t die. And you don’t recover. I have been at these alternations since I was nineteen and I am neither dead nor recovered.” Mrs. Arnold smiles knowingly. We chronic invalids understand one another; we live in a different universe than the healthy.
We chat a little about the neighborhood, and its residents, and I mutter something about the parsons in this town having that wearying quality that oozes from attenuated piety.
She beams at this. “I am so relieved to hear you say so, Miss James. I feel the same way about the clergymen here. The way they are always thrusting their tracts at you! One of them nearly knocked me to the pavement last week.”
“It never seems to occur to them that you might have your own relations with God already,” I say. “And the emphasis on sin! Prostrating themselves and saying fifty times a day that they are miserable sinners. If they are sinners, why don’t they stop, and if not, why lie about it, above all to God? I’ve a good mind to print up some tracts of my own to oppress the parsons with.”
Mrs. Arnold laughs, triggering a coughing fit. When she has recovered, she tucks her handkerchief into her pocket and says she imagines that she and I might have a thing or two to teach the parsons. She looks me over appraisingly. “Am I wrong in thinking you have the mystic temperament, Miss James?”
This takes me by surprise. I’ve never seen myself as a mystic, but then I’ve never met one apart from my father. I give her a brief synopsis of Father’s Vastation and conversion and beliefs and the effect of all this mysticism on our family. “Although I have never been able to ‘take on’ Swedenborg,” I tell her, “I’ve never been able to take this world at face value either. I am stuck betwixt and between, it appears.”
Then something occurs to me. “As you lived many years in India, perhaps you can explain something to me. My brother William was fond of quoting certain Hindoo writings. There was a holy book he was quite enthusiastic about, involving a charioteer who was a god in disguise. What god would that have been?”
After a long, thoughtful pause, Mrs. Arnold says, “I almost never speak of this, but since you ask, Miss James. . . . When I lived in India I would occasionally visit Hindoo temples to see the art, as one does, you know. Inside a temple there is generally a statue of a god, which the priest of the temple dresses and drapes with jewelry as if it were a very beloved doll. People make pilgrimages, leave food and flowers. You must imagine clouds of smoke and incense, Sanskrit chants no one understands (including the Indians), sweets left to rot on the altar. I looked on it as pagan idolatry at first, being a typical boring Anglican memsahib like everyone else in our little colony.” She smiles, somewhat wistfully.
“Then my son died of a fever, and I lost all interest in life. The world became barren and empty, and not just for a few months. It went on for years. It was, I suppose, what your father would have called a Vastation. One day I visited a certain temple dedicated to Krishna. Do you know him?” She asks this as if he were a person with whom I might be acquainted. I say no.
“He is the god you mentioned who is disguised as a charioteer in the Bhagavad Gita, which is the text your brother must have been reading. In one of his aspects, he is fatally attractive to women; he has midnight blue skin and beautiful eyes. There were milkmaids, called gopis, who danced with him in the forest at night, losing themselves in the ecstasy.”
“I’m very surprised that the women would have been permitted to wander off to the forest like that. In India!”
“Exactly. You are very perceptive, Miss James. Every religion contains an element that is the antithesis of all the rest. Imagine good Hindoo wives and mothers—who in India are completely defined as wives and mothers, scarcely people in their own right—stealing out at night, abandoning husbands and children to dance with the God of Love. It is the forbidden, the unthinkable. In Indian society, more than ours, your identity rests entirely on your social role, and, of course, this is especially true of females. Yet there it is, Miss James.”
“I have often dreamed of that sort of encounter,” I say. Then I wonder what on earth I mean. “I mean, it makes perfect sense to me.”
Mrs. Arnold gives me a radiant smile.
“Each gopi is made to feel she is the god’s only beloved, and in her experience this is true. After her immersion in the sublime, her life as a dutiful wife and mother is over, or rather it ceases to be her real life. A direct experience of the divine is always disruptive, you see, Miss James.”
“Well, that would explain a lot about Father,” I say, and ponder this while masticating the seedcake Nurse brought us.
Then I ask, “By any chance, do you know what this means?” In the margin of the Evening Standard, I write tat tvam asi—the strange words William wrote in his diary shortly before he went to Somerville. At the time I took it for some sort of fairy spell, but now it occurs to me that the words might be Hindustani or something of that sort.
It
takes Mrs. Arnold only a second to decode. “It’s Sanskrit. It means, ‘That thou art.’”
Depend on William to know Sanskrit phrases. I ask her what that refers to.
“Excellent question. Call it God. Or, better yet, the infinite. Is your brother a mystic?”
“I suppose he is in his way—as well as a great many other things. He is nothing if not multifaceted.”
Her eyes search mine, as if trying to determine if I am the sort of person to be trusted with a secret. Then she confides that she had “a sort of vision” one day in a temple dedicated to Krishna. It was indescribable, she says; she was galvanized as if lightning had passed through her. She could never tell her husband or friends about it; they’d think she’d gone native. “How do you describe an experience that lifts you out of your life, your personal history, your culture, everything, and gives you new life?”
After she leaves, I think about that for a long time.
ELEVEN
AT FIRST I THINK IT IS A HORRIFIC DREAM FROM WHICH I HAVE just awakened, petrified and breathless. Then I grasp that it is actually happening, in the flat above mine. I make out the screams and groans of a woman apparently being tortured, the angry growls of a man, and a second woman (I think) ranting like a fishwife. My good little Nurse wakes up, throws on her flannel dressing gown, and flies upstairs.
I hear her running footsteps on the stairs, the creak of a door opening, then a man bellowing. Hyena howls from a woman. Nurse’s words are indistinct. A door bangs open and the screaming spills out onto the landing. The fishwife woman screeches some more, the man roars at high volume. “If you bother us again, I swear I’ll fillet you like a fish, and that finicky old lady you work for, too.”
Alice in Bed Page 25
